This invention teaches a system and method for the secure deletion of files on a hard drive. More particularly, this invention is directed to a system and method for securely erasing data files while bypassing the file system of the operating system.
Data security and protection are major issues in the present socio-economic environment. Businesses and individuals need to maintain their privacy in an ever increasing information-based society. Such privacy typically extends to the personal and proprietary files stored on non-volatile storage media, such as computer hard drives. Most operating systems fail to delete a file from the hard drive when instructed to do so by an application or a user. Instead, operating systems remove the link, or address, of the file, while the contents of the electronic data file remain in blocks on the non-volatile storage media. The data remains on the storage media until that area of the media is required for storing some other file. The blocks are only then overwritten with the new data. Until such overwriting, a skilled computer expert can retrieve the deleted data from the non-volatile storage media. Previous attempts have been made to overwrite, or securely delete, the data blocks in the past.
In some operating systems, such as Windows® by Microsoft Corporation, the overwriting tasks are easier than in others, such as Linux, an open-source operating system freely available and widely used. Third-party vendors offer a variety of secure delete applications for the Windows® operating system. Linux, in contrast has relatively few such utilities available. Those utilities that are available have several problems. For example, the utilities typically rely on the underlying file system to write to the non-volatile storage media, resulting in errors in the overwriting of the original data blocks In addition, the utilities require distinct user interaction, i.e., they cannot be initiated automatically by an application. Additionally, operating systems such as the Linux operating system will typically allocate time slices for overwrite operations. Thus, the overwrite operations may be deferred while other tasks are being executed. In an extreme case, application termination or hardware failure may result in an abort of an overwrite procedure, resulting in data still being recoverable.
Thus there is a need for a system and method to securely and correctly erase data files from a data storage that bypasses the file system.